Blind Assassin (41 page)

I ate only half of my hamburger. I couldn’t manage the whole thing. Walter ate the other half, slotting it into his mouth in one bite as if mailing it.

On the way out of the city, I asked Walter to drive me past my old house—the house where I’d once lived with Richard. I remembered the way perfectly, but when I reached the house itself I didn’t at first recognize it. It was still angular and graceless, squinty-windowed, ponderous, a dense brown like stewed tea, but ivy had grown up over the walls. The fake-chalet half-timbering, once cream-coloured, had been painted apple green, and the heavy front door as well.

Richard was against ivy. There had been some when we’d first moved in, but he’d pulled it down. It ate away at the brickwork, he said; it got into the chimneys, it encouraged rodents. This was when he was still coming up with reasons for what he thought and did, and was still presenting them as reasons for what I myself should think and do. It was before he’d thrown reasons to the wind.

I caught a glimpse of myself back then, in a straw hat, a pale-yellow dress, cotton because of the heat. It was late summer, the year after my marriage; the ground was like brick. At Winifred’s instigation I had taken up gardening: I needed to have a hobby, she said. She’d decided I should start with a rock garden, because even if I killed the plants the rocks would still be there.Not much you can do to kill a rock, she’d joked. She’d sent over what she called three reliable men, who were to do the digging and the arranging of the rocks, so that I could then plant things.

There were already some rocks in the garden, ordered by Winifred: small ones, larger ones like slabs, strewn at random or piled like fallen dominoes. We were all standing there, the three reliable men and myself, looking at this jumbled heap of stone. They had their caps on, their jackets off, their shirt sleeves rolled up, their braces in plain view; they were waiting for my instructions, but I didn’t know what to tell them.

I’d still wanted to change something back then—do something myself, make something, from whatever unpromising materials. I still thought I might. But I’d known nothing whatsoever about gardening. I’d felt like crying, but cry once and it’s all over: if you cry, the reliable men will despise you, and then they will not be reliable any more.

Walter levered me out of the car, then waited silently, a little behind me, ready to catch me if I should topple. I stood on the sidewalk and looked at the house. The rock garden was still there, though much neglected. Of course it was winter, so therefore hard to tell, but I doubted that anything grew in it any more, except perhaps some dragon’s blood, which will grow anywhere.

There was a large dumpster standing in the driveway, full of shattered wood, slabs of plaster: renovations were going on. Either that or there had been a fire: an upstairs window was smashed. Street people camp out in such houses, according to Myra: leave a house untenanted, in Toronto anyway, and they’re into it like a shot, having their drug parties or whatever. Satanic cults, she’s heard. They’ll make bonfires on the hardwood floors, they’ll plug up the toilets and crap in the sinks, they’ll steal the faucets, the fancy doorknobs, anything they can sell. Though sometimes it’s only kids who do the smashing-up, for fun. The young have a talent for it.

The house looked unowned, transient, like a picture in a real-estate flyer. It no longer seemed connected with me in any way. I tried to recall the sound of my footsteps, in winter boots on the dry creaking snow, walking quickly home, late, concocting excuses; the inky portcullis of the doorway; the way the light from the street lamps fell on the snowbanks, ice blue at the edges and spotted with the yellow Braille of dog pee. The shadows were different back then. My uncalm heart, my breath unscrolling, white smoke in the freezing air. The hectic warmth of my fingers; the rawness of my mouth under my fresh lipstick.

There was a fireplace in the living room. I used to sit in front of it, with Richard, the light flickering on us, and on our glasses, each with its coaster to protect the veneer. Six in the evening, martini time. Richard liked to sum up the day: that’s what he called it. He’d had a habit of putting his hand on the back of my neck—resting it there, just keeping it there lightly while he conducted the summing up.Summing up was what judges did before a case went to the jury. Is that how he saw himself? Perhaps. But his inner thoughts, his motives, were frequently obscure to me.

This was one source of the tension between us: my failure to understand him, to anticipate his wishes, which he set down to my wilful and even aggressive lack of attention. In reality it was also bafflement, and later, fear. As we went on, he became less and less like a man for me, with a skin and working parts, and more and more like a gigantic tangle of string, which I was doomed as if by enchantment to try every day to unravel. I never did succeed.

I stood outside my house, my former house, waiting to have an emotion of any kind at all. None came. Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

From the chestnut tree on the lawn a pair of legs was dangling, a woman’s legs. I thought for a moment they were real legs, clambering down, escaping, until I looked more closely. It was a pair of pantyhose, stuffed with something—toilet paper, no doubt, or underwear—and thrown out of the upstairs window during some Satanic rite or adolescent prank or homeless revel. Caught in the branches.

It must have been my own window these disembodied legs had been thrown from. My former window. I pictured myself gazing out of that window, long ago. Plotting how I might slip out that way, unnoticed, and climb down through the tree—easing my shoes off, swinging myself over the sill, reaching one stockinged foot down and then the next, clinging on to the handholds. I hadn’t done it though.

Gazing out the window. Hesitating. Thinking, How lost to myself I have become.

The days darken, the trees turn glum, the sun rolls downhill towards the winter solstice, but still it isn’t winter. No snow, no sleet, no howling winds. It’s ominous, this delay. A dun-coloured hush pervades us.

Yesterday I walked as far as the Jubilee Bridge. There’s been talk of rust, of corrosion, of structural weaknesses, there’s been talk of tearing it down. Some nameless, faceless developer lusts to put condos on the public property adjoining it, says Myra—it’s prime land because of the view. Views are worth more than potatoes these days, not that there were ever any potatoes in that exact spot. Rumour has it that a wad of dirty money has changed hands under the table to facilitate the deal, which I’m sure is what happened too when this bridge was first erected, ostensibly to honour Queen Victoria. Some contractor or other must have paid off Her Majesty’s elected representatives in order to get the job, and we continue to respect the old ways in this town:Make a buck no matter what Those are the old ways.

Strange to think that ladies in ruffles and bustles once strolled over this bridge and leaned on this filigreed railing, to take in the now-costly, soon-to-be-private view: the tumult of the water below, the picturesque limestone cliffs to the west, the factories alongside going full tilt fourteen hours a day, filled with subservient cap-tugging yokels and twinkling in the dusk like gas-lit gambling casinos.

I stood on the bridge and stared over the side, at the water upstream, smooth as taffy, dark and silent, all menacing potential. On the other side were the cascades, the whirlpools, the white noise It’s a fair distance down I became conscious of my heart, and of dizziness. Also of breathlessness, as if I were in over my head. But over my head in what? Not water; something thicker. Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

For instance:

Richard and myself, sixty-four years ago, coming down the gangway of theBerengeria on the far shore of the Atlantic Ocean, his hat at a jaunty angle, my gloved hand resting lightly on his arm—the newly wedded couple on their honeymoon.

Why is a honeymoon called that?Lune de miel, moon of honey—as if the moon itself is not a cold and airless and barren sphere of pockmarked rock, but soft, golden, luscious—a luminous candied plum, the yellow kind, melting in the mouth and sticky as desire, so achingly sweet it makes your teeth hurt. A warm floodlight floating, not in the sky, but inside your own body.

I know about all of that. I remember it very well. But not from my honeymoon.

The emotion I recall most clearly from that eight weeks—could it have been only eight?—was anxiety. I was worried that Richard was finding the experience of our marriage—by which I meant the part of it that took place in the dark and could not be spoken about—as disappointing as I did. Although this did not appear to be the case: he was affable enough to me at first, at least in daylight. I concealed this anxiety of mine as well as I could, and took frequent baths: 1 felt I was becoming addled inside, like an egg.

After we’d docked at Southampton, Richard and I travelled to London by train, where we stayed at Brown’s Hotel. We had breakfast served in the suite, for which I would put on a negligee, one of the three selected for me by Winifred: ashes of roses, bone with dove-grey lace, lilac with aquamarine—pale, watery colours that were easy on the morning face. Each had the satin mules to match, trimmed with dyed fur or swan’s-down. I assumed this was what grown-up women wore in the mornings. I’d seen pictures of such ensembles (but where? Could they have been advertisements, for a brand of coffee perhaps?)—the man in suit and tie, his hair combed slickly back, the woman in her negligee looking just as groomed, one hand lifted, holding the silver coffee pot with its curved spout, the two of them smiling woozily at each other across the butter dish.

Laura would have sneered at these outfits. She’d already sneered when she’d seen them being packed. Though it wasn’t sneering exactly: Laura was incapable of true sneering. She lacked the necessary cruelty. (The necessary deliberate cruelty, that is. Her cruelties were accidental—by-products of whatever lofty notions may have been going through her head.) Her reaction had been more like amazement—like disbelief. She’d run her hand over the satin with a little shiver, and I’d felt the cold oiliness, the slipperiness of the fabric, in the ends of my own fingers. Like lizard skin. “You’re going towear these?” she’d said.

On those summer mornings in London—for it was summer by then—we would eat our breakfasts with the curtains half-drawn against the clarity of the sun. Richard would have two boiled eggs, two thick rashers of bacon and a grilled tomato, with toast and marmalade, the toast brittle, cooled in a toast rack. I would have half a grapefruit. The tea would be dark, tannic, like swamp water. This was the correct, the English way to serve it, said Richard.

Not much would be said, apart from the obligatory “Sleep well, darling?” and “Mmm—you?” Richard would have the newspapers delivered, along with the telegrams. There were always several of these. He would scan the papers, then open the telegrams, read them, fold them carefully once and then again, place them in a pocket. Or else he would rip them into shreds. He never crumpled them up and tossed them into a wastebasket, and if he had done that I might not have dug them out and read them, or not at that period of my life.

I supposed all of them were for him: I had never been sent a telegram, and could think of no reason why I might receive one.

Richard had various engagements during the day. I assumed they were with business associates. He hired a car and driver for me, and. I was taken out to see what in his view ought to be seen. Most of the things I inspected were buildings, others were parks. Others were statues, erected outside the buildings or inside the parks: statesmen with their tummies sucked in and their chests stuck out, the front leg bent, clutching scrolls of paper; military men on horseback. Nelson on his column, Prince Albert on his throne with a quartet of exotic women roiling and wallowing around his feet, spewing out fruit and wheat. These were supposed to be the Continents, over which Prince Albert, though dead, still held sway, but he paid no attention to them; he sat stern and silent under his ornate, gilded cupola, gazing into the distance, his mind on higher things.

“What did you see today?” Richard would ask at dinner, and I would dutifully recite, ticking off one building or park or statue after another: the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, Kensington, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament. He did not encourage the visiting of museums, apart from the Natural History Museum. I wonder, now, why it was that he thought the sight of so many large stuffed animals would be conducive to my education? For it had become evident that this is what all of these visits were aimed at—my education. Why should the stuffed animals have been better for me, or better for his idea of what I should become, than a roomful of paintings, for instance? I think I know, but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the stuffed animals were more or less like a zoo—something you’d take a child to, for an outing.

I did go to the National Gallery, though. The concièrge at the hotel suggested it, once I’d run out of buildings. It wore me out—it was like a department store, so many bodies crowded against the walls, so much dazzle—but at the same time it was exhilarating. I had never seen so many naked women in one place. There were naked men as well, but they were not quite so naked. There was also a lot of fancy dress. Perhaps these are primary categories, like women and men: naked and clothed. Well, God thought so. (Laura, as a child:What does God wear? )